[Terr_]

> Software development is experiencing its "assembly line moment,"

I disagree, the history of software engineering is a constant series of "assembly line moments", because we're always making new machines to make the old machines. Compilers, macros, garbage-collecting memory management, and libraries upon libraries.

There's nothing new about seeking to automate oneself out of a job.

[yubozhao]

We always want to go higher leverage/value tasks. This time is teaching others, not just writing code.

We are not automating ourselves out of the job, we are changing the nature of the job. From writing to teaching.

[Terr_]

Referring to LLM-usage as "teaching" is both kinda-insulting to actual teaching--a task not entirely new to senior engineers--and also a rather grand exaggeration of LLMs ability to be-taught.

Twiddling with prompts is not "teaching", it's guess-n-check whack-a-mole until you get something barely good enough to ship, at least temporarily... until it Disregards All Previous Instructions and barks like a chicken or the training data shifts enough that you need to throw on a new set of arbitrary influential phrases.

The lack of easy analogies for controlling an LLM isn't really because it's an amazingly good control scheme, but because it's so weirdly unreliably awkward that it's something humans don't even try to make in our other machines and systems. It'd be like designing an industrial stamping machine so that its controls were buttons on a Twister™ sheet: It'd be quite novel, but not in a very good way.

[yubozhao]

You have a wrong assumption of what context and teaching means with twiddling with prompts.

The job of human is providing teaching via feedback. Your manager does the same thing to you too. And you can distill those feedback into learnable experience for your llm to be better next time.